Friday, October 5, 2007

Familiar faces are squaring off again in the Bradenton mayoral race: incumbent Wayne Poston and his predecessor, Bill Evers. This campaign, though, is taking a new dimension of online shenanigans.

Reporter Melanie Marquez got a tip late Thursday that all wasn’t what it appeared online. Take your browser to wayneposton.com, and up pops Evers’ campaign site. All parties claim ignorance of the crossed lines, but as of this posting, it still wasn’t fixed.

Poston does have a valid campaign site (Melanie missed that one in print; her online story includes that now) at postonformayor.com –- and the gloves are off there, too. Bill Evers’ “legacy” is little more than eroding infrastructure through the incumbent’s website. And Evers’ site has a gritty side-by-side comparison of what he accomplished, vs. Poston’s efforts. (In case you missed Melanie's story,here’s a link:)

Ah, politics. But since Evers' site solicits contributions, there may be more to this story. One attorney told Melanie that while the redirection from the wayneposton.com site to Evers' site might not fall under First Amendment rights, the solicitation portion might have commercial value. Stay tuned.

And check out Bradenton.com this afternoon, for the latest after these candidates square off at noon at the Bradenton Country Club.

This reminds The Master of old-time Forida politics. There was the time George Smathers campaigned against the esteemed Claude Pepper for a U.S. Senate seat in 1950 with a speech that tried to paint Pepper as an out-of-control liberal.

(Smathers claimed he never made the speech, but what do you expect from a Florida Gator?)

Among the lines purportedly delivered by Smathers:

"Are you aware that Claude Pepper is known all over Washington as a shameless extrovert? Not only that, but this man is reliably reported to practice nepotism with his sister-in-law, and he has a sister who was once a thespian in wicked New York.

Also:"Worst of all, it is an established fact that Mr. Pepper, before his marriage, habitually practiced celibacy."